


The Languages of my Heart

by smile_it_will_get_better



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Ghosts, Klaus Hargreeves Deserves Better, Klaus Hargreeves Needs A Hug, Languages, M/M, Protective Ben Hargreeves, Protective Diego Hargreeves, mild ghostly gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-09
Updated: 2019-03-10
Packaged: 2019-11-14 03:58:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18045014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smile_it_will_get_better/pseuds/smile_it_will_get_better
Summary: Klaus Hargreeves and the many languages he learns in his lifetime





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I'm planning for this to have two, maybe three chapters. Depends on how much I write. This won't have much plot, mostly just a lot of ramblings about the different languages that I thought Klaus would have learned. This chapter is all about the languages he learned in his childhood.

Klaus’s mom died giving birth to him. 

She was already sickly when she mysteriously became nine months pregnant and then gave birth to a child with no father. 

She lasted long enough to hold him in her arms and whisper “Mein kleiner Sonnenschein.” Before she faded into death, the nurse on duty prayed for her soul and named her baby Klaus, which was apparently what his mother always wanted to name her child. When she would sit in her hospital bed and sing songs to her imaginary child, dreaming of a family of her own but knowing she was too sick to actually have one.

Klaus of course, didn’t remember this, as he was literally minutes old. 

But she was the first ghost to appear to him when he was five years old, hovering over his bed and whispering German lullabies to help him sleep. He didn’t think much of it at the time, passing the thin sickly woman off as just a figment of his imagination carrying over from his dreams. She didn’t leave after that, appearing while he was at the cusp of sleep, whispering the same words over and over again. “Mein sonnenschien.” 

When he was seven he saw his second ghost, a victim from a car crash he passed, and he finally made the connection between the motherly woman who he thought was a figment of his imagination and the weird apparitions that kept calling out his name, blood dripping down their limbs as they screamed. 

He was afraid of her for a while after that, waiting for the moment when she would start screaming at him too, for when her face would turn into the distorted image the others did and the blood would seep from the wounds she had. But she didn’t, she simply sat beside him and talked and sang. 

When he was eight she was a constant presence, chatting at his back in rapid fire German that he tried to tune out but found he couldn’t. He grew attached to her, not knowing at the time that this was his birth mother, for the kindness she gave off. She would sit by him when the nights got rough, would shoo away the scarier ghosts when he got overwhelmed, and she was always in the corner of his eye, watching and smiling at him. 

He bought an English to German dictionary soon after, teaching himself the words when the lights went out, sounding out the harsh sounds as she couched him along. Six months later he was practically fluent in it, able to chat to her throughout the day to combat his boredom. She told him her story, explaining that she was his mother and Klaus had never felt happier than he did on that day. He spoke to her often, soon knowing German as well if not better than the English he grew up speaking. 

 

German had came easily to him. 

So easily he sometimes forgot that he hadn’t always spoke it. That once upon a time he had no knowledge of the language at all. 

It because his safe language, no one could judge him when he was speaking German. He might just be some useless teenager with powers he was too scared to use and siblings that thought him stupid, but with his mom and various other friendly German ghosts, speaking a language none of his family knew, he felt like the smartest person in the world. 

His mom was there when he went into the mausoleum for the first time, screaming swears at his father as he screamed for help behind her. She was there as the ghosts swarmed him, trying her best to get them away, pushing and yelling at them. Then she was there beside him, whispering words of comfort over and over into his ear. 

Five years later he was slipping further and further into the world of drugs and alcohol, her image fading away as he got high or drunk. She left a month after that, whispering to him that she just couldn’t stand watching this and being unable to help. Years after he last saw her and he still remembered the words she spoke to him, the words he still used to talk in everyday language, unwilling to let the language of his home slip away from him. 

Decades later and he could still hear her whispered voice in his head, comforting him when the nightmares and withdrawals got too hard to handle. 

_“Es ist okay meine Liebe”_ Her sweet voice would whisper in his dreams. And he would cry out for her, not understanding why she left, why she couldn’t bare to watch his descent into drugs and madness. He would cry in the middle of the street, whispering in German in hopes she would come back, so he wouldn’t have to deal with being the disappointment to two separate parental figures. But she never came back, and all he had was the memory of her voice still ringing in his ears. _“Ich liebe dich Klaus.”_

 

_____________

 

He is 12 when he encounters a ghost who spoke a language that sounded like firecrackers going off inside his mouth, who chattered quickly and the words would roll off his lips and the sharp sounds would draw Klaus in, enchanting him with the way they sounded. 

The man had a gunshot wound to the chest, but it was probably one of the milder versions of gore that he had seen in his everyday life so he was able to ignore it as he tried to communicate with him. The ghost claimed in broken English that his name was Sebastian and he died after his store was robbed by armed robbers. 

Klaus simply asked him to teach him Spanish, wanting to be able to speak the language that intrigued him so much. Sebastian agreed, and the two of them would spend hours sitting around the library table, Klaus learning how to manipulate the words until they sounded just right. In just under three months he was partially fluent and able to sustain conversation. 

Sebastian would spend hours talking about the twin girls Klaus’s age that he left behind in Mexico, talking about the culture and the experiences he had while living there. In return Klaus tried to stay sober, already beginning him decent into alcohol, tried to put up with the rest of the screaming voices so his new friend could have some company. 

He loved the ways the languages sounded in his mouth, the mix of English, German and Spanish making him feel like maybe he could do something special in his life. Made him feel that if he could manage to learn this much maybe he would be able to make something out of his life. Could get the ghosts to stop screaming and learn how to manage the fear inside of him. 

But not even the escape of language could help him run away from the screams and the nightmares, and slowly he gave up, allowing his relief to come in the form of whiskey and drugs. 

 

\----------------

 

Disappointment was something Klaus knew inside and out. 

Before he knew Spanish, German, or even English, disappointment was the one language he was completely fluent in. 

He saw it in the face of Reginald every time he failed to be able to look the ghosts in the eyes, every time he wasn’t able to conjure up a ghost for more than a few seconds. 

Reginald was practically the creator of the language, able to convey it not only in words but looks, sighs, the way he moved. 

Klaus learned from a young age that he would never be enough for the man he saw as his father. He tried so hard, put in the extra effort to get even a tiny bit of attention, to get the love he craved from the man incapable of it. But it never came, and Klaus was forced to watch as his father would stand by idly as one of his siblings beat him up for the sake of ‘training’. 

He was forced to watch as his father tsked him and wrote something in the little book of his when he did something wrong. He was forced into the mausoleum and he kept screaming and screaming but his father never came. 

He called out for help, for his siblings, for his father, Pogo, Grace, anyone to just get him out of there, to help his escape the voices screaming at him, the faces and the blood and guts surrounding him. 

But nobody came. 

No one heard him and if they did they never bothered to help and slowly Klaus learned that there was no point in screaming for them. 

So he turned to drugs, relishing the sweet release they gave him, the artificial happiness it provided. Then the disappointment returned. 

It returned in the faces of his siblings, when Luther would storm into his room when he was high and just start screaming about responsibility and how he needed to just stop all this attention seeking nonsense. He saw it in the quiet sighs and shakes of his head when Klaus would say something witty or stupid. He read it in the lines of Number Ones face when Klaus would show up to the table in one of Allison or Vanya’s skirts or dresses.

He felt it when Allison threatened to rumor him to get him to stop hurting himself. He felt it on the look on her face when he laughed at her, telling her that she would never, that she wouldn’t be able to stomach doing that to him. He felt it mixing in with the bitter satisfaction he felt inside his chest when Allison stormed out, tears in her eyes and disappointment in her face. 

He felt it when Diego stole all his drugs, flushing them down the toilet and raising a hand as if to strike him when Klaus came home late at night high and dunk off his ass. He felt it in the rough way his brother would help him get changed and would shove him into bed. In the looks Diego shot him across the dinner table when he did something stupid.

Five thought he was smarter than everyone in the house. He was probably right. Klaus learned disappointment in the frustrated groan he would give when paired with Klaus to study, the way Five would glare at him whenever he would fool around, the general air of disappointment and displeasure whenever Klaus entered the room.

He learned it in the way Ben distanced himself when Klaus started up his self-destructing habits. The way his brother who used to be glued to his side suddenly didn’t want to be in the same room as him. Saw it in the pain filled looks Ben shot him while Klaus distracted him during his reading time. 

He saw it in the way Vanya hated to send time with him when he was literally the only person who made an attempt to acknowledge her existence. In the way she would shoo him away and slam the door in his face when he interrupted her while she was playing. The way her eyes filled with tears when she found him overdosed on his bed, the way she wouldn’t talk to him for a week after he sneered at her for attempting to help him. 

He learned it with the whispers behind his back. The way they all easily dismissed him and his opinions. The way they laughed at him but not with him. The way he felt like a stranger in his skin and every time he tried to mention this they would sigh and say something snobby or condescending. He learned it over the course of his entire life, until he became fluent in it. 

He knew every word, every phrase, heard it over and over again until it started to fall on deaf ears. Disappointment was the language he hated speaking, but it was spoken at him during every moment.

Disappointment was the bitter sting deep inside, the ache that settled into his bones and made tears sting the back of his eyes. Disappointment was the emptiness inside of him that he got form every high and the feeling that overwhelmed him at every sober moment. He couldn’t escape it, couldn’t speak it, couldn’t forget it. 

Disappointment moulded him just as much as every other language did, turning him into the wreck of a human being he was now.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hate how this ended but I didn't know how to finish it well so y'all just have to deal with it okay?
> 
> (Also my notes are going haywire for some reason so I can't change or alter the end notes so kind of just ignore them??? I don't know what's going on lmao I'll attempt to fix it soon)

When Klaus turned twenty he celebrated it by getting high and buying Ben a cupcake. 

After (sorta) sharing the birthday treat with his dead brother, he went out to a club. 

He let himself get lost in the high, the alcohol, the music. So many noises and sensations rushing past him, allowing him to get lost in the motions and forget the bitter regret that he had over being alive at all. 

During the night, somewhere between him taking his fourth pill of the night and dancing with whoever would put up with him, he locks eyes with a girl around the room. She was pretty, with shortly cropped hair and a punk like look to her, he grins and winks at her. 

Ten minutes later they were sitting at the bar together, talking and flirting and buying each other drink after drink. He learned her name was Ruby, she was a fucked-up junkie just like him and she was just taking it one day at a time.

Klaus blacked out after a while, but he woke up in her house, still high but hungover at the same time, her sleeping beside him without a care in the world. From what he could tell they hadn’t had sex or anything, but then again he was never really sure.

They became fast friends quickly after that. They would spend their days together, sticking out the worst of their highs and lows. 

They weren’t dating per say, but it was refreshing to have her around. You needed friends in the life they lived, someone to watch your back and make sure you didn’t end up dead in the ditch from either an overdose, or because you looked at someone the wrong way.

Slowly, over the course of a month, he fell in love. 

He loved the way Ruby would grin at him before she did something stupid, the way she danced like no one was watching and would always breath a bit of life into everyone around him. The way they would sit together in her run-down apartment with smoke drifting around them, laughing and joking and Klaus would feel like everything was going to be alright. 

He asked her to teach him how to speak French a month after meeting her. 

He heard her use it all the time, while swearing at some angry patrons at a bar who were cat calling her, when she was high and laughing at some stupid joke he said, while she slept. He found the words beautiful, the way they rolled around her tongue and echoed around the room. The language of love. 

She taught him while they were high, making fun of him every time he messed up until he stopped making mistakes. And when he could keep up conversation with her he looked her in the eyes and whispered. “Je t’aime.” 

It was silent for a while she studied him, her piercing blue eyes searching deep into his soul until she whispered the words back to him. 

And at once he thought he had finally found peace. Found love with this wild girl who spoke French as often as English, who got high with him and fought anyone who bothered him. Who kissed him roughly and passionately, a sharp smile that promised a night filled with pleasure. 

He was the one to find her dead in an alley only two weeks after his confession. 

She had overdosed, disappearing the night before for a fix while he was still reeling from a week-long bender. 

He is the only one who shows up at her funeral, a small ceremony that is held for any victims that don’t have anyone to pay for a giant funeral. He speaks French to her unmarked grave and managed to stay sober for a week in hopes of seeing her ghost. 

But she doesn’t show up, and soon the grief and the need for the blessed nothingness returns and he falls hard back into his habit. Overdosing a month after her. 

When he was brought back to life in the ambulance he can’t help but be bitter. 

It should have been him in that alleyway, dead after pumping so many drugs into his veins that he can’t think as his heart slowly stops beating. It should have been him. 

And yet it wasn’t, and she lays in the ground rotting and he regularly visits her grave to chat to her, the French that rolls of his tongue nowhere near as beautiful as they way she spoke it. 

 

____________________________________

 

When he is twenty-four years old he overdoses again in the back of some random alleyway. He lays there, alone and shivering and wondering if this is finally the end before he passes out. 

By either a miracle or some very good luck he doesn’t manage to die that night, but he woke up the next morning, crashing hard with an extremely worried Ben by his side. 

After a long, drawn out and boring conversation Klaus promised to go to rehab again and actually stay there for the duration of his time. Normally rehab was just a place for him to sleep while he got himself back on his feet before he snuck out and got high again. 

But looking into Ben’s teary eyes he felt something inside him break. 

He knew what it was like to watch a brother die. If he could provide Ben with this single piece of satisfaction, well it was all that he could do. 

So he went to rehab. It sucked ass. 

Two days in and he was completely sober for the first time in years. The ghosts started trickling back in, mostly the ghosts of druggies that visited here frequently before they died. But there was one ghost that never seemed to fit in. An older woman with slightly greying hair tied back by a bandana, her eyes soft and brilliant blue. 

She would sit in the corners, singing a song in a language he had never heard before. When everyone was asleep he would talk to her, she would listen. He wasn’t sure she understood him, but it was the thought that counted right? 

She spoke to him on the fifth night of their late-night chats, speaking broken English that was stuttered and fumbled around the air. 

They chatted to the best of their ability before Klaus looked her in the eyes and simply said; “Teach me.” 

For the rest of his stay she slowly taught him Yiddish, until they could talk with the barrier of language between them. They talked and shared life stories, and she told him she believed in him and hoped he would get better soon. 

She reminded him of his mother when she would shoo the worst ghosts away, letting him sleep without the screams of the desperate ghosts filling his ear. 

After a month he left rehab and the itch under his skin was just too much. He got high within twenty minutes, everyone but Ben fading from his sight.

He never saw her again. 

_______________

 

Ukrainian came after a young Ukrainian boy showed up when he was going through withdrawal and unable to find anything to get high with, Latin after an extremely old man taught him it while he was half drunk and reeling after a three-day bender. Then it was Greek, and Hungarian, and after that Russian. He learned language after language until it was the only thing he was proud of. 

He spoke them constantly when he was high, switching languages to confuse drunk men and police officers on the daily. He took pride in the ability to learn them in short amounts of time, he words all clicking together in his mind until it was the only thing that made sense in the fucked-up reality of his. 

Then his father died and he said ‘good riddance bitch’ in every language he knew. 

Then the world went to shit and he had to use them all to help him. 

In a room filled with people who died a horrible death, his skills were put to test. He listened to ghosts from all countries who told him their stories, detailing how the fuckers who were torturing him killed them. It was hard to focus, the withdrawal hitting him hard and the pain from the constant beatings making his heart fuzzy and chest ache. 

But he managed, and the look of true anger and fear in their eyes made something inside him twinge with glee. He may not have any freedom, of control, but at that moment he was the one with the cards. He knew all their secrets, every little thing they didn’t want to come to light. 

And he used it with glee. 

______________________

 

He first learn Vietnamese when a soldier ambled into his room when he was sixteen years old, only slightly drunk and the sight of the man standing there with multiple gunshot wounds made him shudder and shake and wish he was able to get just a little more drunk, a little higher. 

He listened to the man shriek in the foreign language for a while before he drowned out the rest in whiskey and beer. 

Standing in the middle of the warzone he wished he listened a bit closer to the soldiers’ rant. 

Dave spent the time teaching him the language, and Klaus studied it hard. He never wanted to kill anyone, in fact, he was pretty much a pacifist and this really wasn’t his type of scene. But he had no choice in the matter. 

So he learned the language so he could speak to the shell-shocked ghost of the soldiers who were begging to know why they were killed. Why they were the ones destined to have this kind of end. 

He tries his best to talk down young Viennese kids who were wrongly murdered, his heart breaking as he watches them cry out for their parents who would never be coming back. He learns the language so that he can talk to the locals who let him drink their beer and dance with them. 

He learns the language because he was tossed into this hell and he wanted to make the best of it.

 

_________________

 

Love was the hardest language to learn.

It was the small quirk of Dave’s lips when Klaus did something endearing. It was soft words and even softer touches. It was kindness and late-night talks. It was a steady presence that helped Klaus survive the hell that was the Vietnam war. 

Klaus thought he would never find anything like it. That he would never achieve true peace and love. But then he met Dave and slowly he began to learn the language over the course of months. 

It was Dave by his side day in and day out. Dave pulling him away from danger and teaching him how to shoot a gun. It was late nights spent together on patrol, not talking but letting the heavy looks speak louder than they ever could. 

It was the disco, lights shining and music blaring. Girls pulling them to dance but they always ended up gravitating back towards each other, locking eyes across the room. It was alcohol and jokes, a beaded curtain separating them from the rest of the world. It was a hand on his face and soft lips against his. 

It was black and white photos, taken while they were standing just a little too close to each other. It was their arms brushing together while they sat at mess, looks heavy with love and passion that they were forbidden to convey. It was sneaking out in the middle of the night, stolen kisses under the moonlight and lingering touches. 

Love was the lightness in his chest, how even as the bullets and bombs rained down around them he felt at home. It was the feeling of belonging, the heaviness in his heart transforming into something warm and nice that made him smile. 

Love was turning to Dave and seeing hope. See a future that he may be able to look forwards to. It was being willing to follow Dave to the ends of the world despite knowing he might not be able to go home again. 

It was smiles burned into the backs of his eyes, laughs echoing around his mind replacing the screams of the dying or the screams of people watching their friends and family die. It was stories swapped in the middle of missions, stories meant to distract from the horrors they witnessed. 

It was tears washed away by warm embraces and kind words, grief soothed by kisses until the ache in his heart was instead filled by warmth. 

Love was everything he wanted and nothing he excepted. 

Love was also closely tied to grief. 

It was tied to the fear he felt when Dave failed to respond to him calling his name. It was the pain that felt like someone physically pulling Klaus’s heart out slowly as he watched Dave bleed out under him. It was the helplessness of screaming for a medic, begging for help and having no one answer. Love was the feeling of despair inside of him as he screamed and begged despite knowing that there was nothing that could save the man under him. 

Love was the emptiness in his chest where Dave used to take up. 

 

_______________________________

 

In the end, it’s fair to say Klaus wasn’t too proud with his life. 

He grew up as the family disappointment, didn’t do much with his powers, became a junkie for the majority of his life, made God literally hate him, fought in the Vietnam war, and then failed to save the world. 

So yeah, not the greatest track record but hey, it would make one hell of a story. 

He wasn’t very proud of his life. How he lived it, what he got to do. 

But he was proud of what he learned, the ghosts he kept company as they taught him, the pain he was able to lesson a bit by being able to talk to the recently dead in a language they understood. 

Sure he did a ton of stupid ass shit, but he wasn’t dumb. He wasn’t an idiot. He had some stuff going for him, even if it was only his ability to talk fluently in over ten languages. 

But it didn’t matter what he spoke. English, Spanish, German, Hungarian, whatever it was. The world still ended. The moon blew up and obliterated all of mankind and then suddenly time was reset. 

And then he was just a 30-year-old traumatized junkie in a 13-year old’s body. He couldn’t change that, could alter anything. But now, he was slowly learning more and more. 

The language of new beginnings. The language of his family and siblings. The language of hope.


End file.
